There have been a lot of direct and oblique references lately in this
NG to monetary issues China, the US, interest rates etc., and
their effect on respective economies. Perhaps this will help explain
the Fed's new "Quantitative Easing" policy and what it means to us
all.

http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=172126
--
Work is the curse of the drinking class.

On 2010-11-16, Caesar Romano wrote:
There have been a lot of direct and oblique references lately in this
NG to monetary issues China, the US, interest rates etc., and
their effect on respective economies. Perhaps this will help explain
the Fed's new "Quantitative Easing" policy and what it means to us
all.

http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=172126

This would be hilarious if it wasn't so terrifying. On the bright
side, no one seems to bitching about welfare mothers, anymore.

nb

*http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=172126

Typical republican claptrap. Some truth, a lot of made up BS. If
you're not an economist and you want to learn more about quantitative
easing in terms you can understand, try this link instead http://
www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/10/07/130408926/quantitative-easing-explained..
This one is also great - you can "translate" the Fed statement into
plain english http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/11/03/131043062/
federal-reserve?ft=1&f=93559255. An example: The first sentence of
the Fed statement "Information received since the Federal Open Market
Committee met in September confirms that the pace of recovery in
output and employment continues to be slow" translates to "The economy
still sucks."

Planet money gives you the facts and BOTH sides of the argument
without the partisan BS.

-J

Those links seem to have got messed up a bit.

Just google:

planet money quantitative easing

-J

On Tue, 16 Nov 2010 13:12:21 -0500, Frank
wrote:

On 11/16/2010 7:40 AM, Caesar Romano wrote:
There have been a lot of direct and oblique references lately in this
NG to monetary issues China, the US, interest rates etc., and
their effect on respective economies. Perhaps this will help explain
the Fed's new "Quantitative Easing" policy and what it means to us
all.

http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=172126

No big deal. It's just the stagflation that a lot of us have
anticipated from the liberals economic policies.

I'm a liberal. I don't support the economic policies that have the
wealthiest Americans now owning 29% of our total wealth. That's up
from 8% prior to Reagan. Trickle down (that would be the conservative
solution to everything) doesn't seem to be working here.

Of course, the Bush tax cuts certainly did stimulate job growth. Mmm.
Maybe not.

In article ,
dgk wrote:


I'm a liberal. I don't support the economic policies that have the
wealthiest Americans now owning 29% of our total wealth. That's up
from 8% prior to Reagan. Trickle down (that would be the conservative
solution to everything) doesn't seem to be working here.
Which of course has been a trend since before Truman.


Of course, the Bush tax cuts certainly did stimulate job growth. Mmm.
Maybe not.
Cut stimulated growth. The problem is that housing bubble (brought
about by many others including Bush) took it all away.

--
"Even I realized that money was to politicians what the ecalyptus tree is to koala bears: food, water, shelter and something to crap on."
---PJ O'Rourke

"dgk" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 16 Nov 2010 13:12:21 -0500, Frank
wrote:

On 11/16/2010 7:40 AM, Caesar Romano wrote:
There have been a lot of direct and oblique references lately in this
NG to monetary issues China, the US, interest rates etc., and
their effect on respective economies. Perhaps this will help explain
the Fed's new "Quantitative Easing" policy and what it means to us
all.

http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=172126

No big deal. It's just the stagflation that a lot of us have
anticipated from the liberals economic policies.

I'm a liberal. I don't support the economic policies that have the
wealthiest Americans now owning 29% of our total wealth. That's up
from 8% prior to Reagan. Trickle down (that would be the conservative
solution to everything) doesn't seem to be working here.

Charting who holds the wealth of the country shows the numbers today look
almost exactly the way the did before the Great Depression. It looks just
like a suspension cable curving between bridge towers. Everyone believes
we've dodged the bullet and the worst is over, but the reality is that the
other shoe is still dropping. Hard. Printing up 600B of "funny money" is
further proof that they have no idea how to fix the economy. Buy back some
factories from the Chinese, maybe? Hah. Once a country's manufacturing
muscle withers, it withers too.

Of course, the Bush tax cuts certainly did stimulate job growth. Mmm.
Maybe not.

Sure they did. The growth just happened to be in crummy jobs with no future
and no health care benefits. But I blame both parties - they have been
selling off the manufacturing muscle of the US to China for decades now.
Clinton was just as happy as Bush to sell off American assets for short term
political gain.

I figure the Chinese will have boots on the ground in California by 2030 at
the latest. There may be some "Gulf of Tonkin" provocation or it could be a
sneak attack, but it will come. War between the big guys *always* comes.
That's when we'll remember that WWII was won not by the side with the best
military technology, but the side that could make it in oceanic quantities.
The Nazis had better tanks, guns and planes, but we had volume. Not any
more. They had the remarkable Tiger tank but we had the cheaper, inferior
Sherman (aka 'The Ronson' because of its tendency to burn when hit "Lights
first time, every time!"). But we had 10 of them for every Tiger.

China's the country that could convert their electronics and vehicle
factories into war materiel plants in numbers that could overwhelm any
conventionally armed enemy. All it will take is some world-wide food crisis
or health crisis, which I am sure we believe ourselves to be immune from, to
change the whole game. The downward trend is clear. We got our nose
punched in Nam. We ran out of Somalia when the headlines turned bad. We're
no closer to an end in Afghanistan than we were 10 years ago and Iraq will
probably splinter once we leave. All that's happened is that a thousands of
US citizen-soldiers were killed and wounded, we spent trillions of dollars
and decimated our overall readiness and our materiel.

In the last few months I've read articles that quoted young Chinese military
officers talking about how China would not be afraid to use "first strike"
nuclear weapons. They don't talk like that to Americans unless it's been
approved at a much higher level. We're busy fighting for people in AfRaq
who are openly telling us "go home, we don't want you" and yet we're
behaving like some dumb guy who doesn't realize he's been dumped, even when
he sees his old girlfriend making out with his replacement. We have a proud
history of fighting yesterday's wars with yesterday's tactics.

China's coming, and by that time, we'll have a military that's well-trained
at creating Muslim "democracies" in countries that hate our guts. They'll
be highly skilled at not shooting *any* of the good guys by accidents (as if
there are good guys!) It's like 'Nam - we're in another stupid war where
the people who allegedly fight at our side in the daytime fight against us
at night. The money we pay Afghan warloads to fight the Taliban ends up in
the hands of the Taliban. We're the fools that fight in a burning house, it
seems, and we keep buying gasoline to make it burn hotter.

This is good, albeit a little old, information about what's happening in the
Far East.

http://www.airforcetimes.com/news/20...rategy_080121/

"Element of surprise-When it comes to conflict with the U.S., Chinese
military analysts favor age-old schoolyard wisdom: Throw the first punch and
hit hard . . . Roger Cliff, a former Defense Department strategist says "If
this conflict happened today, I'm certain we'd prevail," Cliff said. "But as
time goes on, that's not a given."

--
Bobby G.

On Fri, 19 Nov 2010 06:24:28 -0500, "Robert Green"
wrote Re OT Bernanke's QE explained:

China's the country that could convert their electronics and vehicle
factories into war materiel plants in numbers that could overwhelm any
conventionally armed enemy. All it will take is some world-wide food crisis
or health crisis, which I am sure we believe ourselves to be immune from, to
change the whole game. The downward trend is clear. We got our nose
punched in Nam. We ran out of Somalia when the headlines turned bad. We're
no closer to an end in Afghanistan than we were 10 years ago and Iraq will
probably splinter once we leave. All that's happened is that a thousands of
US citizen-soldiers were killed and wounded, we spent trillions of dollars
and decimated our overall readiness and our materiel.

Well said.
--
Work is the curse of the drinking class.

"Robert Green" wrote:

"Jim Elbrecht" wrote in message
.. .
"Robert Green" wrote:
-snip-

Charting who holds the wealth of the country shows the numbers today look
almost exactly the way the did before the Great Depression. It looks
just
like a suspension cable curving between bridge towers. Everyone believes
we've dodged the bullet and the worst is over, but the reality is that
the
-snip-

The site with the original charts seems to be broken now. Perhaps you can
get to the charts referenced at the top of the following page. My browser
now just returns a Whoops.

http://www.businessinsider.com/us-we...quality-2010-7

That led me to here-
http://www.businessinsider.com/plutocracy-reborn
Showing 2 charts. One is "The average income of the top 0.01% as a
multiple of the average income of the bottom 90 percent of US
families"

It does show a huge spike in the late 20's- (897), it stayed below
400 from 1937 to about 1985. Spiked to above 897 in about 2000 -
dropped to about 500 in 2001- and at the end of the chart, 2006, it
was well over 1000 and rising.

The other chart there is tracking the top income tax rate. the
author makes the case that the higher the income tax on the top
bracket- the more equity there is. If you squint a bit I suppose--
but I know how much would be gained by going back to a 94% top
bracket.


This one below is at least accessible, and was fairly easy to find:

http://seekingalpha.com/article/1896...g-1920s-levels


Much better chart. I still don't think we're in for another
depression-- but that one clearly shows how well economics 'trickle
down'.

but it's got a blip (data missing for 50 years!) in the horizontal axis that
makes the suspension bridge tower effect somewhat less noticeable, but if
you look at the 1923/9 and 2002/7 bars for the top 1% it's pretty obvious
that the concentration of wealth is back with the one percenters. This last
one:

http://www.infiniteunknown.net/wp-co...inequality.gif

Shows the two towers quite clearly.
"Share of income for the top 0.01%" A subtle difference from the
first chart- and with an extra spike in the late 30's-- but otherwise
pretty much follows it.


This site:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty

has information about the economist who created that chart and who
specializes in economic inequality. He built statistical series based on a
similar method to that which he used in his studies of France, working with
other economists, particularly Emmanuel Saez. This research led to reports
on the evolution of inequalities in the USA.

The other author of the chart above is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_Saez

As far as I know, they are both world-famous economists. Saez is Professor
of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He received the John
Bates Clark Medal in 2009 and was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2010.

IIRC, Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman is supportive of their work. They may
or not be mainstream in your estimation, but they are in mine.

And I'll add Robert Reich to those who cite their data and respect
them. But I have seen both Krugman and Reich in the past few weeks
and neither thinks we are headed for a depression. They both
have said that it is a drawn out recession and one of the problems is
that all the money is at the top. But there is a world of
difference between recession and depression.


The immensely rich can afford to wait out bad economic times, and their vast
wealth does little to stimulate the economy. It's a pretty easy concept
that in a consumer-based economy, concentrating wealth outside the hands of
the middle-class consumer is a bad, bad thing. Yet that's where we are
sitting. When one of the wealthiest men in America, Warren Buffet, comes
flat out and says the rich aren't paying their fair share, it's probably a
vast understatement of the way things are.

We're in total agreement on most everything except in predicting a
depression. But since humans are historically poor in seeing into
the future- we'll have to wait and see who is right.

Jim
[here's a Reich article that has some thoughts
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/03/opinion/03reich.html ]

"Robert Green" wrote:
-snip-
the middle-class consumer is a bad, bad thing. Yet that's where we are
sitting. When one of the wealthiest men in America, Warren Buffet, comes
flat out and says the rich aren't paying their fair share, it's probably a
vast understatement of the way things are.

Speaking of Warren- did you see this?
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/17/op...17buffett.html

"Thank you Uncle Sam"

I like the line ". . . I did have a pretty good seat as events
unfolded. . "

Jim

"Jim Elbrecht" wrote in message
...
"Robert Green" wrote:
-snip-
the middle-class consumer is a bad, bad thing. Yet that's where we are
sitting. When one of the wealthiest men in America, Warren Buffet, comes
flat out and says the rich aren't paying their fair share, it's probably
a
vast understatement of the way things are.

Speaking of Warren- did you see this?
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/17/op...17buffett.html

"Thank you Uncle Sam"

I like the line ". . . I did have a pretty good seat as events
unfolded. . "

Yes, it's actually open in another window. Are you spying on me!? (-:

Buffet explained the big government payouts of late quite nicely when the
TARP was first proposed, saying that the Feds are the only force great
enough to counterbalance the sometimes bad effects of capitalism and we
should be thankful that they're able to otherwise we would be deep in Great
Depression II.

--
Bobby G.


Jim